Airwaves - Multiverse - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

What if the antihero in your favorite film or book had no chance to repent, reconcile, or redeem himself? There's no victim to rescue. There's no evil to thwart. There's no tyranny to turnover. Instead of saving the day against his better judgment, he just walks a Sisyphean circle of existential malaise doomed to repeat yesterday's vices without the promise of a better tomorrow. Rather than tell this story on the screen or on the page, Uniform tell it on their fourth full-length album, Shame. The trio - Michael Berdan (vocals), Ben Greenberg (guitar, production), and Mike Sharp (drums) - strain struggle through an industrialized mill of grating guitars, warped electronics, war-torn percussion, and demonically catchy vocalizations. InchThematically, the album is like a classic hard-boiled paperback novel without a case,Inch says Berdan. InchIt focuses on the static state of an antihero as he mulls over his life in the interim between major events, just existing in the world. At the time we were making the record, I was reading books by Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, and Dashiell Hammet and strangely found myself identifying with the internal dialogues of characters like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.Inch The lead-up to this moment proved just as intriguing as any of those characters' exploits. Born in 2013, Uniform bulldozed a path to the forefront of underground music. Following Perfect World (2015) and Wake in Fright (2017), the group's third offering, The Long Walk (2018), represented a critical high watermark. Pitchfork christened it Inchtheir most unified-and most deranged-record to date,Inch and The Line of Best Fit crowned them Inchvanguards within the genre.Inch In addition to touring with the likes of Deafheaven and Boris, they joined forces with The Body for a pair of collaborative albums - Mental Wounds Not Healing (2018) and Everything That Dies Someday Com

2017 . The late Mexican electronic musician Oscar Menzel, AKA Airwaves, only realized a small handful of recordings in his short lifetime (including one under the alias 29), but the two Airwaves discs issued back in the mid-'90s remain one of the many undiscovered gems scattered across the vast graveyard of obscure, one-off electronic music projects and recordings. Released during the era when musicians the world over were firing up banks of synthesizers to inaugurate their own take on the ambient subgenre, Menzel's cosmic creations took the stuff of legend (Eno, Tangerine Dream, Schulze, Namlook, and a gaggle of others) and recontextualized them via sonic easels adorned with fresh daubs of paint. This resulted in such sparklingly effective concoctions as the two-part shimmer festivities of InchBiomechanicalInch, the gorgeous starshine twinkle of InchA Little Twilight MomentInch, and the Steve Roachian broadbase expanse of InchSunset Mists Distant PeaksInch; in short, an exploration of tones and timbers that sounded strangely familiar yet still eerily unplaceable. Menzel's fire burned but for a brief time, but electronic music aficionados can rejoice that his art exists to further illuminate the planet.

In many ways, DJ Black Low's debut album, Uwami, shows the signs of an artist's first offering in any musical genre. Showcasing fluency in a broad range of styles and stuffing a number of ideas to the record's brim is the 20 year-old producer's attempt to both introduce himself to a wide listenership and stamp a recognizable sound in their minds. In other ways, somewhat out of the young South African producer's control, Uwami goes against the grain.The 11-track album released on the Awesome Tapes From Africa imprint comes at a time when South African electronic music is being fundamentally disrupted. Amapiano, the electronic music movement which first gained popularity with a small, core group of followers, now dominates the mainstream. Well-known and pervasive, amapiano borrows from a diverse palette of musical styles which are popular in South Africa's largely Black townships- jazz, kwaito, dibacardi, deep and afro house among them. Instead of pandering to the seemingly insatiable local appetite and growing global penchant for amapiano though, on Uwami DJ Black Low seeks out the limits of the sound du jour and tries to stretch them. On his solo productions, he uses the samples and compositional norms that make amapiano hits the bedrock on which to experiment and improvise. With collaborators, DJ Black Low improvises within the boundaries of listener-friendly grooves.The sound he creates has foundations of what could easily have progressed into captivating amapiano songs on their own. But he uses improvised but structured electronic percussion and distortion sounds to drive the tracks in a particular direction. What remains is something like a deconstructed amapiano.For a young producer living in the townships of the greater Pitori area of South Africa's Gauteng province, there were few avenues available for Radebe to pursue a career in music. His trajectory shows th